Tag Archives: Dabiq

In the 118th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s newsletter, there was an acknowledgment of Salah Abdeslam as a “brother”. Abdeslam is a Belgian citizen of Moroccan extraction, who acted as a logistician and facilitator for the 13 November 2015 massacre in Paris, though failed on the night to carry out his own part in the atrocity. Abdeslam is one of the few conspirators involved in the Paris attacks and the subsequent bombing in Brussels on 22 March 2016 who is still alive.[1] The significance of this is that IS has generally ignored its operatives if they end up being arrested, and Abdeslam is an acute case of this: he has never been acknowledged in IS’s propaganda since the Paris attack, notably being excluded from the twelfth issue of IS’s Dabiq magazine released on 18 November 2015 that named the Paris attackers and described how the operation was carried out. The Naba article is reproduced below. Continue reading →

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr., 25, of Columbia, Missouri, on 21 February 2017, for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State (IS) and plotting an act of domestic terrorism. The plan had been an attack on 20 February, the first Presidents’ Day of the Donald Trump administration. Continue reading →

The 107th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s newsletter, was released on 27 November 2017. On page 8 there was an article that cautioned against applying apocalyptic prophecies to the present day. A very rough translation is produced below. Continue reading →

The Khansaa Brigade, the all-female Islamic State espionage network and morality enforcement police, based in Raqqa city (image source)

A debate has been ongoing among analysts since the summer about the view the Islamic State (IS) has of mujahidat (female fighters). IS now seems to have settled the matter in its newsletter, Al-Naba. Continue reading →

The ninety-eighth edition of the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, Al-Naba, was released on 22 September 2017. This Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France, was evacuated on 17 September due to a bomb scare, and later declared to be a “false alarm”. This edition of Naba claims that an IS operative in fact planted a bomb, causing the chaos at Charles de Gaulle. Al-Naba 98 also contained a further acknowledgement of the “bucket bombing” at Parsons Green tube station in London, Britain, which took place on the morning 15 September 2017. Continue reading →

The United States announced on 27 July that it had killed seven “senior ISIS propagandists and facilitators in Iraq and Syria” since late March. The removal of these terrorists takes from the Islamic State “extensive experience and training, and degrades ISIS’s ability to plan and conduct attacks on civilian targets in Iraq and Syria, as well throughout the region and in the West,” U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said. The geographical pattern of the strikes that killed these men allow some conclusions about IS’s current situation on the ground, and the information provided by CENTCOM underlines IS’s will and capacity, even as it loses its caliphate, to conduct external operations. Continue reading →

It was reported on jihadist websites and by local activists that Turki al-Binali, a senior cleric of the Islamic State (IS) and perhaps the most important public proponent of the caliphate’s formation, had been killed in Syria by an airstrike from the U.S.-led Coalition on 29 May. IS has been silent on this despite releasing their newsletter al-Naba and the tenth edition of their English-language propaganda magazine Rumiyah since then. On Tuesday, the intelligence services of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq confirmed that al-Binali had been killed. Continue reading →